The rise of ready-made breakfast cereals in the last years of the nineteenth century marked the end of the tyranny of porridge, and with it the demise of the thible, a stick used to stir porridge. The thible is an excellent example of a device that people used for centuries before giving it a name: since ancient times people in England knew enough to stir their porridge while it cooked, but it was not until the end of the fifteenth century that it finally occurred to someone to call it a thible. Until then, they could only refer to the implement that prevented their breakfast from becoming a complete disaster as a stick. The origin of the word thible is completely unknown; the word thibler, meaning one who wields a thible, has never existed.